Company: Octopus Energy, London, England
Company Description: Octopus Energy is the UK's largest power supplier with 6.8m customers and 54m contracted utilities accounts globally via licensing. Founded in 2016, by Greg Jackson, the company has 8500+ employees globally, expanding operations in 27 countries. We're proud to be the ONLY Which? Recommended Energy Provider for a record 7 years and Top 10 Sunday Times 'Best Places to Work for' in 2023 and 2024.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Achievement in Customer Service Automation
 Nomination Title: Magic Ink
- Briefly describe the nominated organization: its history and past performance (up to 200 words):
Total 200 words used.
Global Entech disruptor Octopus Energy launched in 2016 to advance a sustainable energy future faster and cheaper through the power of cutting-edge technology.
In 2023, we surpassed British Gas, to become the UK's largest electricity provider with 7m customers, supported by our mission-driven team of 10,000+ UK shareholder-employees.
The game-changing impact of Kraken, our customer-centric technology and business model, is driving relentless fast-track success. Kraken’s advanced data, machine learning, and AI capabilities are transforming energy for people, our grid, and our planet as we transition to a renewables-powered world. We’re delivering world-class low-carbon energy experiences at 40% lower cost than rivals.
Meanwhile, our unique organically-growing team structure empowers small teams of 10 agents with Kraken’s ‘One Customer View’. Each team looks after the end-to-end journeys of sets of c 65,000 customers and acts as a separate £50m business unit. Teams then split to welcome new customers, new joiners and open up team leader positions with no loss of knowledge, showcasing a high-performance start-up vibe culture that keeps customers and employees happy and loyal.
Thanks to our dedication to customer service, we’ve achieved unrivalled 7x Which? Recommended Energy Provider wins, and improved Best-in-industry 4.8 /5-star Trustpilot customer scores.
- Outline the nominated achievement since July 1 2022 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 250 words):
Total 250 words used.
PIONEERING DIGITAL-FIRST AI TOOLS TO SOLVE CUSTOMER QUERIES BETTER AND FASTER
During the energy crisis in 2022, our business experienced higher spikes in peak demand than ever.
Customer call volumes more than doubled, and customer agents were spending double the time on calls. Customers were really struggling with energy costs and needed guidance. However, it wasn’t possible to hire fast enough to keep up with the sudden, increased call volumes.
Around November 2022, Generative AI was coming to prominence. We asked ourselves if we could use it to empower our customer-facing teams to automate routine customer emails - such as meter readings, bills queries, and refund requests - with customer-ready AI-generated emails - easing their load.
In January 2023 we developed and tested our brand new Magic Ink AI tool and training programme, and by March, our entire 1000+ customer service team were trained and confidently using Magic Ink.
To date, Magic Ink has delivered massive increases in productivity and stakeholder satisfaction, including:
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25,000 Magic Ink emails sent out daily (35% of total): equivalent of 250 employees’ time saved
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6,239,087 customer calls summarised: equivalent of 695,379 hours of talking time
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9,415,901 messages generated (Apr' 23–Aug’ 24)
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33% of emails require zero to minimal edits
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Higher 80 ‘Customer Happiness’ scores for AI responses: vs. 65 for non-AI responses
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Highly-positive feedback including
- Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):
Total 239 words used.
Proud to be revolutionising customer communications through Magic Ink AI-generated emails, our supporting document provides testimonials, images, and data evidence to fully demonstrate the claims we’ve made in our entry.
Slides overview:
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Snapshot of good to know stuff about us: Launch, growth, and successes to date
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Mission and Goals: Advancing a sustainable energy future to benefit all as described by our inspirational CEO and founder, Greg Jackson
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Kraken: Showcasing our proprietary technology and model which underpins everything we do
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2022 Business Context: Drivers that doubled the volume of calls
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2022 Business Context: Drivers that double the length of calls - there was no way we could staff up fast enough
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Aims and Actions: Championing Magic Ink technology and training to reduce the burden on our customer service teams
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Achievements: Magic Ink successes in numbers
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Achievements: Examples of 5-star Trustpilot customer reviews show how Magic Ink is enabling faster, better and simpler customer email experiences
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Achievements: Highly positive customer service agent feedback
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Competitive Edge and Boosted Performance: Transcending old school cut-and-paste templates with personalised added-value user experiences
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Competitive Edge and Boosted Performance: Drastically saving agents’ time with summaries and transcribed calls in seconds
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Competitive Edge and Boosted Performance: Giving agents full control to use or not if deemed better for their customers
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Competitive Edge and Boosted Performance: Fully-verified contextualised content reflecting individual language & style of customers AND agents - Magic Ink is the ultimate in customer service automation excellence.
- Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes, explaining the nominated achievement since July 1, 2022, OR written answers to the questions? (Choose one):
Written answers to the questions
- If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video. If you are submitting written answers to the questions for this category, provide them in the spaces below.
- Explain why the achievement you have highlighted is unique or significant. If possible compare the achievement to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the organization's past performance (up to 250 words):
Total 249 words used.
DELIVERING AI SUPERPOWERS TO OUR CUSTOMER SERVICE TEAMS
Unlike many AI schemes, Magic Ink isn't about cutting jobs. Rather, it has augmented our teams’ capability and capacity to focus on higher-value customer interactions - leaving the low-value repeat customer emails for Magic Ink to process. All of which is boosting employee trust and loyalty.
COMPETITIVE EDGE AND BOOSTED PERFORMANCE
Magic Ink transcends old-school templates which cannot easily refer to customer history, are static, outdated, and inaccurate, and typically offer a cold, formal style - resulting in a poor customer and agent experience.
By developing our tool and training in-house, we have full control and can make real-time improvements and add new features when needed, without having to rely on or wait for third parties.
Supporting unrivalled levels of customer experience, operational efficiencies and end-to-end quality, Magic Ink offers:
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Summaries of customer history and calls
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Prompts e.g. tariff info, customer balances etc
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Edits with all feedback going into Kraken’s self-learning engine
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Verification flags for names, phone numbers etc
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Responses intuitively reflect the language and style of customers and agents
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All emails checked by a human before being sent
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Option not to use at agent’s discretion
Since introducing Magic Ink we’ve been managing peak demand spikes faster than ever - by automating more than 35% of all daily customer emails - which is freeing up teams to look after high-priority customers. Plus Magic Ink emails receive higher 80 Customer Happiness scores than non-AI generated emails - a WIN-WIN all around.
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